Dai Shogun episode 1 – Musashi Gundoh’s long lost cousin

This is awful. You should watch it.

I’m actually a little staggered by Dai Shogun. This is an anime with big name talents behind it with as the writer of Cowboy Bebop Dai Sato. It has character designs that have clearly had effort put into it. It has an actual animation studio that can do animation on it with JC Staff. OK sure I think all JC Staff anime suck, but not like this. This is different. Something is going on behind the scenes at Dai Shogun. You don’t make an anime this bad and put it out thinking “yup, I did a good job there”.

Even leaving aside the animation for one second, the writing is atrocious. It’s jokes about boobs and more boobs but played in an oddly serious manner at times. The women are all sex charged loonies and all the men shout all their lines. It’s stupid and unfunny and also vaguely offensive. The animation though looks like flash animation. You know those ones where everyone looks like they’ve held characters up on sticks and waved them around for movement? That is everything in Dai Shogun. Except even in flash animation they seem to usually be in on the joke. Inferno Cop is animated like this and that’s clearly done in a humorous fashion. The tragic thing is I don’t think Dai Shogun’s animation is intended to be laughed at.

It’s like they did out the storyboards and then just forgot to hire animators or something. Nothing moves. The mouths move (incidentally not in time with the spoken dialogue). There’s some highly dodgy CG animation at some points, mostly in the OP, which somehow look even worse than your usual highly dodgy anime CG. It’s like they’re trying to hide the lack of movement with shaky cameras, which only serve to highlight it even further. On the very, very, very rare occasion they try some actual animation animation, it’s clunky and full of missing frames and makes you wish they went back to just shaking the pieces around on sticks.

Dai Shogun would be a very bad anime even with normal animation. It’s evidentally had no effort put into anything apart from maybe the character designs. But as it is, with that animation, it reaches a whole new plane of existence. It is not as bad as Mushashi Gundoh. None of the character designs have jpeg artefacts. But it’s on a similar level. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Dai Shogun was just a front for some yakuza operation. If this isn’t cancelled before the end of the month, I’m going to assume it is a yazuka front. You don’t put something like this on TV as an actual anime. Something is going on here.

Their basically non-existent animation budget makes it easy to tell what their priorities are, the woman sometimes have some animation.^^
Also even the old looking grandma has gigantic breasts.
And yeah even with proper animation it would still be a shitty anime.

Also this has nothing to do with this, but the tab was open and I wanted to rant (WiXOSS spoilers): Damn WiXOSS episode 2 annoyed me to no end. The failed attempts at (wow level) drama. The annoying way the new one speaks. But most of all the lack of details in the card games. It is you damn battle mechanic, the only thing I know in your battles is who is winning. Your characters need to tell us who is good because we can’t judge that for ourselves because you show as little as possible. And for all I know no-self-confidence girl couldn’t have won even if she tried. Show us her options. Her giving up is meaningless without knowing that she could have down anything.

Also geez I don’t care that you are in your brother, many people have crushes that do’t come to fruition, handle it a bit better please… The characters are so emotionally immature… Well they are teenagers but still.

Likewise. The charm of the shit animation style wore off really quickly and I was left with the main reason I avoided this in the first place – unmodernized Japan setting with shitty mecha and perverted elements. This thing really should have been a short if it wanted to keep my attention the entire way through.

Scamp, as an old Terribad colleague, I expected better from you. Everyone wants this to be the next Musashi Gundoh, but no one has actually seen enough Musashi Gundoh to understand the gravity of that comparison. But you have! And you should know Gundoh was much more than cheap animation cuts and a wonky script. Sound effects were grossly out of sync. Foreground and background didn’t match perspective. Wrong characters would be animated speaking lines. Basic coloration and size of objects was inconsistent between consecutive cuts. The lady was missing her forearm for an entire shot! It was rife with unfathomably amateurish mistakes that would’ve gotten the show cancelled on junior college network TV, let alone being unfit for professional broadcast.

Is Dai Shogun a bad show? Of course. But in the world of badly made TV cartoons, Dai Shogun fits somewhere between Gifuu Doudou and Sparrow’s Hotel. Musashi Gundoh is on another plane of existence.

You know, you’re right. My memory has slipped a little of how bad Musashi Gundoh is. The jpeg artefacts on character designs were all I could remember off the top of my head, but now you’ve jogged my memory.

Now, that said, Dai Shogun is waaaaaaaaaaay worse than Gifuu Dodo. Sparrow’s Hotel falls into that category of doing bad animation for a gimicky joke so possibly doesn’t count. Dai Shogun has everything else I can think of from this decade beat, except maybe perhaps Baby Princess.